Riding out the Wave / Retrenching a Bit

Thursday, November 10, 2011—Orange, California


Busy days are these. But I do seem to be getting a handle on things. I can see the semester closing out and a reduced work load on the horizon. Still, there’s not much going on besides school I’ve been too busy to work on the novel lately (or much else in the way of “personal” writing—that’s why I’ve only been doing about an entry a week here). Greg came down from Santa Cruz this week and it was nice to hang out with him. (Unfortunately he’s down because his brother was in a nasty car accident, which really took the edge off his visit.) I’ve been doing some interesting reading lately. I’ve decided to put down the Brothers Grimm for a while so I don’t get burned out on that stuff. I’ve picked up Part 1 of Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, which is something I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. I’m also reading NJG Pounds’ classic An Economic History of Medieval Europe, which so far is really good. I’ve also started the process of prepping the BSP books for Kindle editions, which is something that’s been hanging over my head for a while. I can’t wait till break, though, when I’ll have time to see more people. Feeling OK these days, but a touch isolated. My life’s also far too narrow at the moment for my tastes. Just about five weeks to go, though, and then a bit of freedom will come by way …


Forgot to mention that I’m still working on learning Greek. I’m also still enjoying it. I wish I had the time to dive into it head first—right now all I can do is nibble around the edges of the language.






I’ve been looking back at my last couple entries and can now see how tangled they might seem to the average person, how big and crazy. This is because I’m going thru a period where a lot of different streams of thought are coming together for me—I’m beginning to realize how interconnected everything is; those posts are me wading into this understanding and trying to make sense of it for myself and others. They are of course first steps, so they’re bound to be a bit messy.

After getting some comments from people who’ve read them I also understanding a bit more what I’ll have to do to both develop these ideas and get them across to other people. Most people have only a light understanding of history. Or more specifically, they don’t really understand what it is. This, I think, is because they’ve been so poorly taught in regards to this subject. History, especially at the more introductory levels (which is all most people experience), is taught as series of events that have little reason for being except that people are doing things—in other words, force of personality drives human events. This turns history into the study of a kind of political psychology. This, though, is only a tiny part of what’s going on. What’s often all but ignored is the ecological and economic contexts in which humans make their decisions. In other words, many of the mechanisms that drive human socio-cultural evolution are largely left out of the equation.


I now see very clearly that if I want to write about the issues that now interest me I have to explain this broader context along the way. Human cultural evolution is driven not by "great" men and women, but by resources and our attempts to control them—human actions are a byproduct of these quests. History then is really the study of human ecology—understand the nature and value of resources (including their geography) and you understand a great deal about why our societies have developed in the ways they have and what our future options might be. Any book I write on this subject will have to start and then work out from this basic understanding. This means that the first essay in this book will have to be a broad overview of human biological and cultural evolution up to the beginnings of agriculture. From there I will have to explain the massive changes that came with the domestication of plants and animals. From that point on I can begin to branch out into the cultural ecology of our current predicaments.


Ok, I've got to cut this short. I'm sure I have more to say, but I just can't spare the time right now. Onward!

The Brothers Grimm Launch Point

Thursday, November 03, 2011—Orange, CA



Still trudging thru this difficult semester. I feel, though, like I’m getting a handle on things—finally. My hip/back is more or less back to normal and I’m getting caught up on my school work; all I have to do is rework a few lectures and then my semester will mellow out considerably. What’s really frustrating me, I’m beginning to realize, is that I have so little time for serious writing. This is especially annoying in that the main reason I teach to begin with is that it’s supposed to leave me with the time to write. Oh well, at least my schedule next semester is looking much more reasonable. Maybe this forced fallow period is a blessing. I was a little burned out after finishing Mother Earth and probably needed a break. I just don’t like being pushed into anything—I want my writing to wax and wain because of my own internal dynamics, not because of forces coming from the outside.






Still, I’ve been getting into some interesting places intellectually lately. I think I mentioned earlier that I’ve started learning Greek. So far I’m really getting into it. Unlike romance languages, the structure of which I always found a bit counterintuitive (I’m already enjoying learning Greek far more than I ever did French, which did little beside drive me up the wall), Greek grammar makes sense to me. I also like the sound of the language, the way it feels in my mouth and brain. It’s of course very early in this journey for me and my opinions may change, but for now at least Greek really seems like I a language that I could learn well. Crossing my fingers on this one …


I’m also continuing with Grimm’s fairy tales. Telling stuff. Though I’ve long been familiar with a lot of the stories, or at least their basic themes, in other incarnations, reading them one after the other is causing me to see some patterns I only sort of noticed before. The one I find most striking is the role of the forests (the woods) in these tales. They’re always places of mystery, of strange and often dangerous happenings. They’re also places of darkness, places inhabited by bears and wolves and other creatures that inspire fear in the story’s human characters. A lot of these stories go back to the middle ages at least, I’m sure, and the social-environmental juxtapositions really bear this out. What these are are stories told by people living on farms and in towns that are surrounded by then widespread, but now mostly long-gone, European forests. As farmers, though, these people have long lost most of the important connections with their ancestral foraging past. In other words, these stories are byproducts of living near wild wooded ecosystems, but not really in them. When their (our) ancestor’s traded their foraging lifeways for that of agriculturalists they lost their knowledge of these environments—and fear tends to fill knowledge vacuums. In Grimm’s fairy tales then there is a direct connection with the advent of agriculture and our general loss of ecological knowledge. Forests have become a place to gather berries and get firewood, but little else. They are something to be tamed, culled, destroyed, turned into fields “safe” for farming. This, I’d say, directly correlates with the current collapsing of the world’s last wild ecosystems: we destroy that which we don’t understand, both out of fear and because on many levels we don’t even realizing what we’re doing—ten-thousand plus years of agriculture have left us that divorced from the wild world which spawned us.


All this ties into broader views I’m developing on human history. Like most people in the Western world I grew up viewing history as a series of political decisions—the disgusting doings of one scum-bag king after another. I now see this as a side show, the outcome of bigger forces. What history really is is the evolution of how we relate to our environments.

So far there have been two overarching modes of human behavior: the lifeway of the forager and the lifeway of the agriculturalist. The forager gains his/her living thru complex interactions with what are essentially wild ecosystems: they shape these systems only to a slightly greater degree than most other creatures in these realms. Agriculture, however, is about control. It is the mass simplification of ecosystems to meet short-term human needs, (or perceived needs): everything that does not directly serve us get ripped out and replaced with a plants and animals that will do our bidding, so to speak. We lived the first of these lifeways for millions of years (if our full hominid lineage is included). Agriculture is only 12,000-10,000 years old. Until extremely recently the most important intellectual lineage it has given us is the aforementioned diminution of general ecological knowledge—this informs nearly every move we have made, from our diets, to disease, to the nature of our towns and cities, to our rising populations, to our general social systems, to our intellectual accomplishments, to our religions, etc. etc. However, this lifeway, as we currently practice it, cannot go on.


The instability of socio-economic systems based around unthinking ecosystem simplification have always been striking—human history since the advent of agriculture can be viewed as one long series of wars over dwindling resources. As the planet hits seven billion people and we sit on the verge of planet-wide environmental collapse it has become apparent that we’re going to be entering a new phase in our existence—one way or another. If we continue as we’re going cascading ecological collapse is a given. If this happens there will be planet-wide war and famine, of which only a relative handle of people will survive, if any (the lifeway of these survivors will be the equivelent of picking thru the garbage heap of our socio-ecolocial failure). The second option will be to enter a phase in which we begin to infuse the re-aquired knowledge of our forager ancestors into our lives. The result will be a worldwide compromise with the rest of the living world. Smaller human populations. Many more wild ecosystems. Farmer as ecologist. Economics and political science taught as small subsets of ecology. A demise of the religious structures that have arisen out of predatory agricultural societies and the emergence of philosophies which combine science with the values of ancient animist-pagan notions of land and spirit being co-joined (think a kind of Daoist-sacred woods religion that both informs and learns from science instead of battling it). A human mindset thru which we see ourselves once again as part of the planet instead of its owners.






Wow, that’s a lot to get from the Brothers Grimm! It doesn’t surprise me, though—I’ve been living with these massive kind of thoughts, developing them for years now—and they’re ready to come out. One of the writing projects I see for myself in the coming years is a book of essays where I discuss these kinds of topic—in a much less tangled and better realize manner that I’ve started doing here. What I’m doing, I can now see, is using this diary as a warm up for this book. Now I’ve really interested to see where this diary will go in the coming months—I apparently have a great deal to say.

More Massive Thoughts -- Big Pagan Rob

Thursday, October 27, 2011—Orange, CA



Not much new going on since my last post. I’m still buried in school and dealing with my hip/back injury, (which has gotten quite a lot better). I’m writing a bit: I’ve added some to the new Backwaters book. Not sure how I feel about it. I can tell it’s going to be a slower, more contemplative book than the other two and I’m still getting used to that, to writing with a mindset that accepts that slower pace. I have some ideas for short stories that have been rolling around my head. I’m thinking of playing with those for a while and letting the Backwaters book sit for a bit, as it’s feeling a little green, like I might have started it as touch early. I’m also thinking of working up some of my material for the Greece book, some squeezes based on the places I went. I’m really wishing I had more writing time—there are some ideas I have that really need to be played with on paper instead of just my head …






I’ve been doing some interesting reading lately (and, I believe, some interesting thinking). I’m in the middle of a book on European paganism I’m really enjoying. I’m also starting to dig into Grimm’s fairy tales. Though it may not seem like it on the surface, I consider these books to be closely related. One thing I’m interested in these days is the transmission of cultural consciousness. Specifically I’m fascinated with aspects of Western culture that have survived from deep in its past: something close at least to the bedrock of my cultural heritage. One of the hardest parts about being of the modern Western world is that we seem to have no understanding and little interest in what has made us the way we are—we are adrift in a sea of rapidly proliferating technology, which provides almost constant excitement, but very little nourishment. We have lost connection with the basics of life, like getting our own food and water and dealing with each other: life is series of housing tracts connected by strip malls, into which our necessities are brought in from the outside in truncated form: shrink-wrapped food and cultural interaction largely as something virtual (TV and the internet); so much of the time I feel that we’re simply consuming as opposed to living. I want to dive deep beneath this unpleasant surface and find, well, our soul, whatever that might be.


Part of the key to this for me is scraping off the thin, destructive layers of the religions of the book—Christianity mostly—which I see as odd Middle Eastern imports that have smothered so much of the indigenous European consciousness. The native Pagan beliefs and rituals of Europe were (are, in some cases) local, or at least highly adapted to the cultural-environmental matrix into which they entered. This, by definition, makes them more relevant to their practitioners than Christianity, which sees the divine as being separate from the “natural” world in many important ways, which largely sees humanity as something separate from the rest of the existence and everything else on the planet as being created simply for the use (and misuse) of humans. This is why it can spread so easily—it’s not really connected to any place, and therefore it can occupy any cultural space. The problem is that it occupies this space by in large part destroying the aspects of a culture that keep it in touch with the world around it. In other words, it takes people from regional, highly adaptive socio-ecological systems and deposits them into a global abstract belief system that by definition keeps them one step from their local environments. It’s not an accident that early Christian missionaries insisted that the sacred groves of European Pagans be cut down, for they represented a very tangible connection between local gods and day-to-day life in real environments, which is a massive challenge to a church that can offer no such local relevance. Christianity then means local subordination to an outside god, which goes in tandem with the outside political structures that brought it in. This is religious colonialism, an imperialism at the level of belief, that paves the ways for the loss of local control at not only the religious, but the governmental level as well—“Onward Christian Soldiers” is one of the most honest songs ever written …


All of this is an incredibly long-winded way of saying that I want to search for those fragments of my European heritage that have survived the Christian invasion of Europe. To understand who I am I need to hear the echoes of the deep past, maybe those of events going deep into the Paleolithic. A good first step in this journey, I think, is learning what is known about our Pagan past. I want to do this not only thru written records and archaeology, but also thru trips like the one I took to Crete where I can commune thru the eons thru Pagan landscapes themselves. I also want to begin sifting thru our storytelling tradition: for it is thru art that these ideas most likely have the chance of survival (albeit often in highly mutated form). The Grimm stories perhaps can’t trace their direct heritage any further back than medieval times, and they’ve also been deliberately Christianized in spots (often by the Brothers Grimm themsevles). But they are a good starting place to look for the echoes I’ve been discussing. After them? Hans Christian Anderson. Irish fairy tales. Arthurian romances. The Decameron. Beowulf. Icelandic sagas. And hundreds of other stories I right now have no idea exist. I’m just at the beginning of this journey, so much so that in many ways I really don’t even know exactly what I’m looking for …


What started this? All sorts of things, many of which I’m sure I’m not consciously aware. A big part of it, though, is the Backwaters books, which I’m now seeing as fundamentally being an attempt to reconnect with place, to break free of the globalist abstraction that I believe (ironically) is leading the planet to ruin. Who am I? I am man of Europe extraction whose ancestors invaded and colonized a lands to which they do not yet belong, after leaving lands they lost touch with. Like most children of this kind of colonial diaspora I’m largely free floating, from a place, but not really of it. My life’s work as a story teller, I’m beginning to see, is to help contribute to the immensely difficult task of turning that "from" into an "of" for us all.

Post in a Minor Key

Thursday, October 20, 2011—Orange, CA


Feeling strange today, a bit untethered. I found out that Irvine Valley college is going to be hiring a new full-time anthropologist for the fall. I will apply for his job, but I doubt I’ll get it (I’m not even sure if I want it). Assuming I don’t get it there’s a very good chance that there won’t be any more classes for me to teach in the fall, or that I will be cut back to maybe one. Either way, it will mean that it’s time for me to move on. I don’t know what this means, though. I want to be a free agent, but I’m also not quite ready for that move (or maybe I am but just don’t know it). I know in the long run leaving there is a good thing: my life is only sort of working now and there are lots of things I’d like to do I can’t while I’m so buried in work. Still, feeling the anxiety that always accompanies any life change. I’m trying to look at every change in life as an opportunity—somehow I know that I’ll use this as major starting point for something, something big . It will be interesting to see what that something is … And of course how will I pay the bills? An incredibly boring question that always seems to be popping up in life …



I should be ready to send the Backwaters books off to two publishers next week. Feeling very ambivalent about this: I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do. These days it’s hard to figure out what a publisher even is. Maybe I should just try and build up BSP and stay the fuck away from these teetering gatekeepers of the old guard. Do I need a publisher? Does any writer need a publisher these days? Why should I put my work in the hands of someone who probably won’t get it? My distaste for anything that has to do with marketing is also playing a role. I really believe on books finding their audience thru word of mouth mostly, thru a literary brother and sisterhood. The idea of someone hawking my books like their dish soap really bugs me. Fantasizing about building an audience up person by person, under the radar, away from the toxic inquiries of the mainstream media. “In dreams begin responsibilities” –Delmore Schwartz. Hmm …


I’ve been putting quite a bit of work into the third Backwaters novel this week. It’s far too early to say how or where it’s going, but I’m definitely enjoying the effort so far.



Still dealing with pain from my injury. It’s getting better, but slowly. I get the feeling it will still be with me to some degree months from now.



Burnt out on teaching, on having time to do little else. Back around to the beginning of this post, my fear/hope of a lost job. Once again, maybe I’ll just stay in Greece this time. Picked up a beginning textbook on modern Greek. Haven’t had time to delve into it yet. See what I mean?

Occupy Everything

Saturday, October 15, 2011—Long Beach, CA



Finally feeling better. Three weeks almost to the day of pain—which has been moving from my back to my hip to my hamstring in a kind of circle—finally broke a bit yesterday. It got so bad that I had to take three classes off so I could heal a bit. Now, though, I can feel that I’m on the way to being myself again. I can now definitely understand now how people with long-term pain issues can become addicted to painkillers or in extreme situations off themselves—continuous pain just wrecks your life and eventually starts taking away who you are.


Because of my injury there’s really been nothing much going on in my life: I’ve mostly just been trying to get thru what I have to to keep my life functioning. One big thing has happened, though. This weekend I broke ground on the third novel in the Backwaters series. It’s been welling up in my for a while, so I wasn’t surprised, but it’s still a great feeling to have it underway. I’m only a handful of pages into it , but already I like where it’s going. Also, ideas as to what I can do with the book are also flying thru my head, which can’t be anything but a good sign.


On the subject of the Backwaters books, I’ve started the process of finding a publisher/agent for them: I’ll have them off to Canongate, a large independent based in Scotland next week. I’ll also be trying Soft Skull, a smallish U.S. house based out of Berkeley. As usual, I’m not expecting anything, but I’m not pessimistic either: I know I’ve written something special and it’s just a matter of time before these books land in their proper home. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if maybe this “proper home” might be Burning Shore Press. I’m so soured on capitalism at the moment that I just can’t see how any publisher operating in that world will get what I’m trying to do; these novels are so beyond capitalism, so beyond the socio-economic structure of today that I don’t think they can find an audience except thru slow word-of-mouth methods—they need to percolate up thru things, like the cultural equivalent of groundwater becoming a spring. Then again, who know where things are going culturally?


For years—decades really—a lot of us have been wondering when people would finally hit the saturation point and start rising up and take down those who have created this incredibly exploitive world economic infrastructure, which is designed mainly to funnel wealth from those who actually work for it upwards to those who don’t. I think this saturation point has finally been hit. These “Occupy” protests that are now spreading around the world will just get larger and more radical. We want nothing less than to control our own neighborhoods, cities, countries, our own economic systems, our own environmental relationships—we want to control our own lives, in other words. I keep hearing people say how these demonstrations will fizzle out. I doubt it. So many of us have hit the wall—we simply have nowhere else to go: our futures are being taken from us, have been taken from us. When you have no future you fight in the present. The bailout of the banking system (with our money), for its benefit, not ours, combined with the collapse of the housing market and employment opportunities, seems to have been the final straw: it really brought home to the average person how things work. Now that this has happened people will start to really figure out why they work the way they do—the mechanics of how they’ve been getting screwed their whole lives, to put it another way. How things will proceed for this point is hard to say. I do believe, though, that we’re in for nothing less than a complete restructuring of huge aspects of government and economic systems. If these systems don’t exist to benefit the vast majority of us then what do they exist for? Once people get this one the whole house is coming down. I can’t wait until that wrecking ball starts swinging …

Some Big-Ass Rob Ideas

September 29, 2011—Orange, CA



A difficult week. I injured myself working out last weekend, which is really slowing me down. I felt a pop right where my back and left hip connect and have been barely able to move since then (I’m not sure whether to classify it as a back or hip injury). Teaching has been a drag because of this (so has getting to and from my campuses), and when I’m at home I’ve been pretty much bedridden. I’m still in a fair bit of pain, but the back/hip has loosened up a bit and I can get around better. I’ve had similar injuries before—they usually hurt like hell for about a week and then cause me discomfort for at least a few weeks after that. In other words, the whole thing sucks mightily.


I’ve been really busy too—lots of work for school. For next semester, I’ve been asked to teach a class in Native American cultures, which I’ve never done before. This is going to entail a massive amount of research to do right, research which I’ve already started. Add this to my normal workload, the reading I’m doing for the new cultural anthropology reader I’m putting together, and the stuff I’m doing to revive BSP and I’ve got a lot on my plate. Because of all this I don’t have much of a life at the moment. This will eventually wear on me, I’m sure. But right now I’m so into what I’m doing that I haven’t really noticed how narrow things have become (physically and emotionally, if not intellectually).


Still, I’m feeling good overall, happy about where I am in general in life. This happiness is coming most directly from the fact that I can really see where I’m going as a writer and how my work will tie (is tying) into the world around me.


Right now I have at least three books I see myself writing in the next few years, books that will be combining my literary interests with my studies of anthropology and ecology. I’m starting the third Backwaters book, and soon I will expand into non-fiction, which will mean the Greek book I’ve got planned, plus a book worth of essays that explore the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of my current fiction. What are these underpinnings? I’ve hit a place in life where I’m completely rejecting capitalism and even the idea of the nation state; both are institutions of totalitarianism, by definition. I also reject the idea of “growth,” as the term is generally used—more oppression in the name of “progress” and “improvement” that is in reality the destruction of the wild world and human socio-cultural systems in order that their components can be more easily exploited by a foolish few. I now realize that I am an anarchist in the way Thoreau was. This also makes me a conservative, in the sense that I’m actually interested in conserving things, such as our ability to live as free beings in a world where other creatures are allowed to do the same thing. I’m getting more radical in every way as I get older, as I learn more. But only radical in comparison to the radically strange and destruction cultural phenomena of our age, which are actually way out of line with the rest of human history. I am a radical only as a conservative counterpoint to the insanity of the permanent-growth economy and the corporate state. All this and much more lies at the roots of my fiction and will lie at the roots of my non-fiction. I am not an angry man, just one with increasingly clearing vision. I am a man who just wants to live a free wild life and take as many people with me on this journey who want to come along …


Big words. Big thoughts and ideas. Too big, feeling swamped by them. That’s why I write formally, so as not to drown in all I’m thinking, understanding, and feeling. Jesus, where’d all this come from? …

Chugging Along

Monday, September 19, 2011—Irvine, CA


I’m tired. And I have a headache, have had a headache off and on for days now. I’ve picked up sinus infection, which is not only giving me headaches, but messing with my vision; it’s been really hard to read, which is a bummer because that’s pretty much all I’ve been in the mood to do lately. There’s nothing I can really do about it, though, other than let it run its course. I’ve tried antibiotics on them before and they don’t help much, plus they make me feel like garbage in other ways. They also seem to lower my resistance, which means I get more sinus infections than I would if I just let my body fight them off. So that’s what I’m doing—toughing it out. If this one plays out like my previous sinus infections I can look forward to feeling crappy for at least another couple weeks (I’ve already been battling it for at least two weeks already).


Like I said, this sucks because I’m feeling really anti-social lately (or maybe it’s the sinus infection that’s making me feel this way) and want to do little besides get lost in books. Despite it being uncomfortable, and sometimes painful, I’ve still been doing a bit of reading, continuing with the Patrick Leigh Fermor book I’ve been working on, as well as some archaeology literature for school. Last night I also pulled the Richard Beringen’s collected poems off my shelf. When I first read him a few years ago I was quite impressed by his technical abilities and his erudition. His stuff didn’t really hit me on anything close to a gut level, though. I’m enjoying much more this time around (I planned on only reading a few poems and ended up reading thru the first sixty-five pages of the book). He really is good, clever, but not in negative way. He seems like a poet one needs to read thru multiple times to get a good understanding of what he’s about. I almost placed the book in my to-sell pile (I’ve been thinning out my library). I’m now really glad I didn’t let it get away.


Been working on some of my own stuff as well, editing mostly, not writing. I’ve finished the final edits of Edgewater, and now only formatting issues remain on that book. I hope to have it up to Eric for final formatting by next week. I still have to redesign the cover. Don’t know when I’ll find the time for that. I’ve also been going over Backwaters and Mother Earth again, fixing typos and doing some minor revisions that I think are really helping the books. Speaking of these novels, I’ve decided to give myself one year to find a publisher and/or agent for them. If I don’t I will put them out on BSP. I’m not thrilled by this, but they are the kind of books that could help build BSP. The publishing climate it so bad now that I’m afraid if I don’t have this backup plan I could end up having to sit on the manuscripts for years, which would be a tragedy—these works need to see the light of day. In fact, as soon a I’m done with the design work on Edgewater I’ll begin playing with book cover ideas for BWB and ME. I want then ready to go if and when the time comes. I Will be contacting my first English publisher this week, in regards to these books. Crossing my fingers. Expecting nothing, of course.






Not much else to report. Working, reading, and feeling shitty is pretty much all that’s going on. Exchanged an email with Steve about a possible Sacramento reading during Winter Break, assuming Edgewater is out by then. Hoping to do one in Santa Cruz too. A (very) mini Northern California reading tour.






Still feeling disconnected to my surroundings—my post-Greece alienation from this place isn’t going away. Trying to figure out what this means, what my next step is. Having stomach problems on top of my sinus issues. I was having all sorts of stomach issues before I left for Greece. Once I was there, though, most of them mellowed or went away (except my growing issues with dairy). Now they’re back a bit. I wonder if stress has anything to do with it? Just existing in Southern California these days is somewhat of a white knuckler. How much longer am I willing to deal with this increasingly stupid place?